I use both my iPad Mini and my iPhone 6 for note taking with the “Notes” app. Is there a way to share my notes with friends or colleagues?
I think I’m supposed to say “use Evernote” here because of its smooth and easy multi-device sync capabilities, but I actually use the “Notes” app on my iPhone quite a bit to keep track of ideas, reference URLs, and other snippets of information that I might need in the future.
One way I share it is by simply copying and pasting the content into an email, but it turns out that the Notes app itself has very sophisticated sharing capability and a number of useful options.
In fact, at the highest level you can see that there’s even a category of Notes you can take that live in iCloud (e.g., on the net, not just on your device):
For this demo, however, I’m going to tap on the “On My iPhone” category to get a list of different notes that I have taken on the iPhone.
Notice that they’re neatly organized by date. And the info that shows up? That’s the first line of information in the note:
The third one down is a reminder about Linotype the movie so I’ll tap on it.
The note opens up and shows me that the last time I added content to it was Oct 21, 2014:
To share it, all I need to do is tap on the share button on the bottom center of the screen.
It’s the button that looks like a box with an arrow launching upwards out of it.
The result is a sharing panel with a lot of choices:
AirDrop is worth checking out if you’re trying to share it with another iOS8 device: it lets you set up an ad hoc network without wifi or anything else involved. Darn handy!
I’m guess that’s not what you seek, however, so the second strip of icons is where the action is. From the left, you can see Message (aka iMessage), Mail, Twitter, Facebook and the mysterious “More” button that we’ll touch on in a moment.
For now, tap on “Message” to send it to a colleague via text message:
Easy enough! Simply enter one or more recipients in the To: field and tap “Send” to share the contents of this particular Note.
But before you split, let’s back up because I want to show you one more thing.
On the screen where you have the set of icons for iMessage, Mail, Twitter and Facebook, if you tap on the three-dot button it turns out you can customize which buttons show up, and in what order:
You can see that I have omitted Google Plus and Pinterest, but they could be enabled if some of my notes are suitable for sharing with those communities. You can also reorder the buttons by tapping and dragging on the three horizontal bars buttons on the right edge.
Hope that helps you get more out of Notes.